Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Young Marrieds Odyssey, Part Two by Greg Dziawer

Alice Friedland was available in Betmamax and VHS in 1981.

Video Killed the Loop Star

Young Marrieds on VHS

Previously at Ed Wood Wednesdays, we shared a page scan from a 1981 UK adult mag titled Tip Top. That scan was an ad for mail-order loops—quite late in the game, as tape was rapidly taking over—that included a loop derived from Ed Wood's last-known film as a director, 1972's The Young Marrieds.

In this week's Young Marrieds Odyssey, we're travelling to the UK once again, bearing witness to the box cover from a nearly-forgotten tape release of The Young Marrieds and speculating on its ties to that magazine loop ad.

Videotape quickly became the norm in the 1980s. Cheap exploitation films flourished on the medium. In the UK, a company called Dapon released a clutch of low-budget sex films on both VHS and Betamax in 1981. Among them: The Young Marrieds, presumably like the rest shorn of any hardcore content, although the majority of titles were transition-era softcore circa 1970-1971. Three films released on tape by Dapon in this cluster were produced by Jack Descent (Agent 69, The Family, and Love from Paris) although Jack recently told me that he had no recollection of this release. It was Joe Rubin of Vinegar Syndrome who pointed me at the site listing for the Dapon video releases. Identifying a crossover point, Joe noted that the tapes released by Dapon were, concurrently, excerpted for the loop home market. We may never know how, but Golbek Sales, the company selling the loops, must have had some affiliation with the tape distributor Dapon.